I've been working with our SQL DBA's to work out whether we can and should use SolarWinds for SQL Server monitoring. SAM does provide a SQL monitoring templates and AppInsight for SQL, however these don't seem to provide the functionality that a specialised tool like RedGate SQL Monitor does (for example: https://monitor.red-gate.com/GlobalDashboard#Critical=false&Warning=false&Healthy=false&Group=&BM=&HistoryGroup=&HistoryTimespan=1440)
So I'm looking for advice from anyone who has looked at whether SolarWinds is a good tool for SQL Monitoring. There's a number of issues:
(1) There's limited ability to configure AppInsight for SQL (I've discussed this with support)
(2) I can see a way to create a usable dashboard like those in SQL Monitor link above. AppFabric doesn't really offer anything useful
(3) SolarWinds doesn't appear to support modern SQL authentication but required a password stored in credentials
(4) If I want to give our DBAs the ability to set-up and configure their own application monitors it looks like this gives them edit permission across all SAM monitors.
Some things are relatively straightforward such as monitoring services and processes, but beyond that it feels like more specialist tools would do a better job (e.g. SQL Agent Job Failures, SQL error logs deadlock and stack dump, indexes with more than 100 pages and > 30% fragmentation). Yes, we could purchase the Database Performance Analyser module, but this is for monitoring performance rather than monitoring errors and alerts on the underlying SQL servers.
